Guidelines for highly effective Websites
Mar 8, 2009 Website Development, Website Setup
Reprinted from http://briancray.com/
Strategy, strategy, strategy
Be strategic when you decide to launch (or redesign) a Website. Don’t just throw something together or you’ll end up with what you started—nothing. Always start with a purpose—the most compelling reason for your Website to exist. It must be compelling or you’ll die a silent and painful death on the Internet.
An effective Website has goals branching from its purpose that are—
- Specific—Avoid vague like the plague. Be clear to the people involved in building your Website and the people using it so everyone is on the same page to create a solid brand presence.Here are examples of specific goals:
- Blogs—Inform American college students aged 18-25 about the personal finances
- Insurance—Obtain leads for agents to personally contact
- E-Commerce—Sell green consumer products through contracted agents
With a specific purpose in mind you can put measurements in place.
- Measureable—How will you gauge the success of your Website? You will spend your time and money to launch a Website and you’ll need a way to show it was all worth it.Here are examples of measureable goals:
- Blogs—Grow subscriber count by 20% monthly
- Insurance—Influence 25% of visitors to submit for a quote online
- E-Commerce—Attain a $5 return per visitor
- Realistic—Have you ever heard someone say “I know it sounds to good to be true, but it’s true and it will be BIG!” I have, and it never amounts to anything. If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is. Don’t expect your blog will be Mashable overnight or your e-commerce site an Amazon killer. You allowed to have a vision, but set attainable goals please. Don’t set yourself up for failure, set yourself up for success.
Conversion–oriented
Okay you’ve set goals to fulfill a purpose. How will you achieve those goals? Effective Websites are designed like a funnel—people come for many reasons and need guided to specific actions. Those actions should lead to or be a conversion process that fulfills your strategic goals.
Here are examples of how to fulfill strategic goals through conversion:
- Blogs—Grow subscriber count by 20% monthly
- Add clearly visible subscribe links
- Encourage new visitors to subscribe
- Encourage subscriptions at the end of each article
- Create quality content that appeals specific industries
- Encourage readers to become fans at Technorati
- Write articles on a clear and regular schedule
- Insurance—Influence 25% of visitors to submit for a quote online
- Add a link to a free quote at the end of every product page
- Advertise free quotes online in direct mail
- Add a link to a free quote as part of the top level menu that stands apart from standard navigation
- E-Commerce—Attain a $5 return per visitor
- Add related products to each product details page
- Offer discounts on low-selling products
- Upsell higher quality products
- Feature highest selling products on homepage
Design as a call to action
As I’ve said before, Website users have the attention–span of goldfish. As soon as they complete their task, they want to know what to do next. It is up to us to provide them with a next step and to not leave them with nothing to do. If you leave your users with no clear next step what do you think they will do? With a simple mouse click they’ll leave your site forever. Lost opportunity.
Every design element should be thought of as a call to action. Navigation calls upon the user to find what they want or to explore the site. Headlines call upon the user to read the copy. Your copy should lead to a call to action, such as encouraging feedback or asking for a donation. Any design element that does not engage the user is clutter. Eliminate it.
Personas
Visitors to a site can often be grouped into an encompassing profile based on common behaviors and goals. A persona is simply a defined profile of a likely user to your Website. A persona can include:
- Behaviors—How do they use yours and other Websites?
- Demographics—Who are they?
- Geographics—Where are they in the World?
- Psychographics—What do they believe? More importantly, what drives them to act?
- Purpose—What is their goal?
Once you have a set of two profiles that encompass the majority of your visitors, design your Website so that people who fit these profiles can complete their tasks as easy as possible.
Here are a few loosely defined example personas:
- Blogs
- Subscribers who come from RSS readers to comment on your article (opportunity for pingbacks/comments and social bookmarks)
- New readers who found your article on a search engine (opportunity for subscribers)
- Insurance
- Shoppers looking for the best quote (opportunity for new customer)
- Policy–holders looking for insurance information (opportunity to cross–sell)
- E-Commerce
- Current customers looking to check shipping (opportunity for customer feedback)
- Shoppers browsing music (opportunity for purchase)
Landing pages
Landing pages are pages custom designed to fit the needs of a visitor to increase conversions. Landing pages often have a special URL to which visitors who fit the profile are directed. Because of the extra resources involved in creating landing pages, they are typically reserved for circumstances associated with already high conversion rates and high dollar values.
Here are example circumstances that warrant a landing page:
- You send out a massive direct mail with a special offer for your new coffee bean. The direct mail piece refers them to a page on your Website that talks solely about the coffee bean and the special deal with a clear purchase process.
- You run a TV ad that promotes the environmental–awareness of your products. The TV ad directs them to a special page with a sweepstakes to win a hybrid car in exchange for information that you can use for an upcoming product launch.
That’s all for now
I hope you enjoyed this extensive article that I think of as the intersection of marketing and Website design. To read similar insights read my other entries and subscribe to my blog. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!
CSS Tools for Website Developers
Jan 18, 2009 Graphics Design, Website Development
This weeks’ tips are all about CSS, (stands for Cascading Style Sheets), in our Free Resources page.
The first couple are to create rounded corners for boxes in the website. They are extremely easy to use and come in very handy for those that don’t know how to write the code from the top of their head.
The third is CSS menu creator to allow you to have fly out or down tabs. I haven’t used this one and I’ll have to admit, it does have a bunch of fields for values to input. But it does look interesting.
The last one is as simple as the first two. Just select the colors, fonts and sizes and it gives you a real time preview of how the form looks. Click on the “Your CSS” button and it allows you to download the stylesheet to your computer.
It’s All About PHP and PHP Resources
Dec 29, 2008 Website Development
This week we have some PHP resources for you to review. For you seasoned PHP programmers, this may just be Ho-Hum. For others’ it’s a nice little list to help you get that extra little push.
We’re already into our 9th week of tools and tips and it’s getting hard to remember which ones’ were posted already without going back to the site page to see.
I guess I’m going to have to organize this resource list a little better because I don’t want to start duplicating some of the tools and websites that I’ve already posted.
Maybe an Excel Spreadsheet or a Word Document to keep me organized is something I need to set up.
Anyway, for all of you who read these posts, have a very Happy New Year and let’s all strive for prosperous 2009.
Tags: PHP programming
More Website Development Tools
Dec 21, 2008 Website Development
There seems to be a never ending list of website development tools. This week, we have five website tools to help you, as we did the last few weeks.
I’ll have to admit, though. With the holidays coming up, my time has diminished to almost nill. What we really want to do is create a video for the tools we posted and show how to use them. But, that will take time. Time that certainly is limited. But, we will get to those “How To” videos to help everyone.
The one thing I noticed is, there’s a lot of visitors every week, but not too many leaving comments. That would help us tremendously. Not only would it help us to provide more content, but it would help you by providing the content you are looking for. So, leave us some comments. You can leave it anonymously.
Thanks again and enjoy the tools this week.
